I get a team. I hope you're bloody great. It's me.
So today I want to do something different. It's very different. I've never done a podcast like this before. So I'm going to say up front, some of you this will be interesting. Some of you we will be relevant.
For some of you it might.
Just be an interesting listen because you are a trainer, or you are an exercise physiologist, or you are a group exercise teacher, or you work with older people who or you work in the health wellness space more broadly. But I just want to give you some ideas. I want to share some ideas and thoughts and exercises and activities which I believe are really really underutilized and I believe are potentially powerful, helpful and potentially transformational additions to
anyone's kind of day. So one of the things that happens is as we get older, quite often and quite obviously, we tend to stop doing a lot of things that we did when we were kids. You know, running and playing and moving in lots of directions and climbing shit and jumping shit, and you know, playing with balls and throwing balls and catching balls and just a lot of incidental fun based stuff that we did for no reason other than just to hang out with our friends or to have fun.
Or to move or to.
You know, whatever it was. But we don't do that when we get older. And while I understand why we don't do that, it would actually be great for us if we did maintain a level of I don't need to do this, but I'm gonna do this activity, a level of fun, a level of play into our day to day kind of operating system.
So, I mean, you all know that I'm going.
To advocate for strength training for older people and for you know, lifting and doing some pilarates or doing some body weight stuff, and doesn't matter where the environment is. And you know, walking every day, you know, ten thousand steps give or take something like that.
You know all of that stuff. So today is not going to be that.
Today's me suggesting some or giving you some movement options, some options for your body. None of them are particularly hard at all. I had a look at the list. I've got ten things on my list. My dad could do these. I'm not saying it could do all of
them brilliantly. But Ron is somewhat restricted at the moment, and he's eighty five he's eighty six in a week or two in fact, next week July four, Happy birthday, old fella next week as I record this, And there's just a lot of stuff that we can do to maintain function as we get older, but we tend not to do a lot of really easy to do things just because.
I don't know, just because that's what life dictates, that's where we're at.
So by introducing some of this stuff, or all of this stuff, like I've said, there's ten things, it might be one, might be two, three, four or five. It could be the whole lot. None of them are hard. Like I said, Now, let me just preface this by saying, of course, this is not a personal prescription or program.
If you are worried about any of these from a health or a safety perspective, for you, see your doctor, see your exercise physiologist, or your trainer, or probably a doctor and say, look, this is some of the stuff I heard might not be a bad idea to incorporate into my day to day.
What do you think some of you will know?
You probably don't need to go to that length because none of this is particularly intense or difficult or complicated or requires an immense amount of skill or conditioning. So without further ado, here are the ten things that I reckon are great, free, relatively easy to do, don't require any special equipment, don't require a special exercise outfit, but done consistently, can really make a significant physiological functional shift.
And not just physiological and functional from movement point of view, but also psychological and emotional, because we know when we change our body, when we get a bit fitter and a bit stronger, and a bit healthier, and a bit more balance and a bit more all of those things, we get a bit more confidence, and we get a bit more joy. So it's this stuff is of course it's in essence it's addressing physiology, but it kind of there's a flow on effect to our mind and our
emotions and our day to day states. So that's really portner as well. So the first thing I'm suggesting that you do, if you're interested in trying this, is just some real basic balance stuff. One of the things that happens as we get older is we lose balance. One of the biggest challenges and dangers and problems for people over seventy is what's commonly referred to as age related falls, and people fall for a couple of reasons. But one
of the reasons. One of the reasons is they don't have enough muscle, They don't have enough strength to recover if they trip. But also another really crucial factor is they just their balance as shit. Their balance is not what it once was. And so we know that at any age, even my dad's age eighty five turn in eighty six, my dad can still improve strength and balance and coordination and you know, europic endurance and muscular endurance given the right stimuli doing things the right way. He's
not going to make the Olympic team. He's not going to run a sub you know, four minute mile, is not going to bench press his own body weight anytime soon. But what we know is that bodies are adaptable. And if we go from doing nothing to like, if you go from doing no balance work and then you introduce two, three, four, five minutes a day of balance work, all things being equal, you're going to see an improvement. It's not high risk, it's not dangerous, it's not there's not too much exertion.
So when I say balance.
I'm suggesting you start with something like this, just standing on one foot and you might want to do this initially near a bench or near something, eyes open by the way, eyes open facing the bench, where if you feel like you're going to fall or over balance, you can catch yourself, you can grab yourself. So my suggestion is, you know, obviously one foot a time, one foot off the ground, one on the ground, one off the ground,
and maybe installments of ten seconds. Start with ten seconds, build up to fifteen and build up to thirty, build up to maybe build up maybe to a minute. And you might want to have your hands on your hips. You might want to have them out to the side. It probably doesn't matter too much. Typically you'll find it a bit easier if your hands are not on your hips but rather out to the side, because it allows you to adjust and adapt and correct.
A little bit.
Now, I know this seems like as I'm saying this, I'm like, this is so bloody fundamental. Do I really need tell to tell people how to do this? And probably not, I probably don't need to tell you how to do it, But just the idea of saying, you know, what if I incorporated three million, three minutes of balance a day, so I did you know, right leg, left leg? I'm just muck around like that, and I do three minutes a day, that's twenty one minutes a week of
balance stuff. If I do it every day, that's twenty one minutes a week. I'm investing into training my muscles and my nervous system in a new and different way to improve a really important component of fitness and mobility,
which is balance. And then you'll find, you know, maybe you get to the point where you can do thirty seconds really easily and it's not a challenge, then you might want to try again stand close to something that you can grab, but you might want to try with your eyes closed, and that kind of that makes it
a whole new ball game. So I'm suggesting balance stuff, you know, even like for those of you who are you know, relatively fit, strong, functional, you might go Craig, That's that's like too easy for me.
I'm going to go cool.
So what like, for example, I do is quite often let's say I'm washing dishes. I might think this is bullshit. This is one hundred percent true. If I'm washing the dishes, I will see if I can wash all of the dishes on one foot, and then I'll dry all of the dishes on the other foot, so I might be doing a task. Sometimes I'm currently sitting at my desk, but it's a stand up desk, so it comes up
and down. Some days, I'm doing a podcast where I'm chatting to someone and I'm standing, not sitting, and I will just swap feet. I'll stand on one foot for as long as I can, and then I'll stand on the other foot. I'm still present, I'm still having the conversation. No one knows what I'm doing, but I'm working my nervous system and my muscular system, and I'm improving or working on my balance while I'm doing something else. And yes, that would equate to a man multitasking.
You welcome.
The next one, which is a no brainer, is stair walking or maybe a light jog, depending on where you're at. Stairs are great walking upstairs one at a time or maybe two at a time. I have stairs in my house. I probably walk up and downstairs twenty times a day. You think about that over seven days, that's one hundred and forty times a week. I'm climbing stairs. And that's obviously not part of my exercise program. That's incidental, but one of the by products of me climbing stairs one
hundred and forty times. It's probably more, it's probably two hundred times a week. I'm up and down the stairs all day because I work from home as well. But one of the byproducts or benefits for me having been doing, you know, two hundred flights of stairs every week of my life for the last thirty years or so that I've been living where I currently live, is that my
legs are actually really quite strong. So I've got quite strong quads, quite strong butt, sorry to tell you that, and quite good muscular endurance because I'm getting up and down the stairs all the time. Now that's before I even train my legs in the gym. But what we know also when you're obviously when you're going up a step, you're stepping with one foot ones remaining them bringing up the other one. So there's an element of balance as well.
So if you can walk up the stairs, for those of you can walk up the stairs without holding onto a railing or a rail, I should say, if you need to do. But walking up stairs and downstairs is great for strength, great for a bit of muscular endurance, great for aerobic endurance, and if you want to up the intensity of course, you can step two steps at a time, you.
Can vary the speed, you can do more volume. But even you know.
Consciously doing five minutes a day where it's not incidental, it's intentional. Or it could be a hill, it could be a ramp. There's a ramp right near me which is about eighty meters up, and I quite often I walk down to the bottom of that ramp and I run up the ramp and I do that. You know, I don't sprint up, but again I might do that five times, and that down and up the eighty meter ramp might be sixty let's be honest, but it's really steep.
It's really steep.
And I do that five times every time I walk past it, and that probably takes me in total four minutes. So things like where we are actually carrying our body weight uphill, be that you know, on a ramp or an actual hill or stairs, greatful lower body strength, great fitness, of course, you know, essentially pretty easy to execute.
And if you are older and more.
Frail and with worse balance, do it, but do it slower and more carefully and hold on to the rail, and you might graduate to no rail and more reps or more stairs and a quicker speed over time. Number three on my list is which I've spoken about once or twice, is backward walking. Now, of course, when I say walking backwards, this can be fraught with danger. I'm suggesting you don't do it, you know, in Chapel Street in Melbourne, or you don't do it in the middle
of people or a crowd. Of course, I would suggest that if you want to try a bit of backward walking, go slowly to start.
Do it on grass. The reason that I love.
I actually really love backward walking. I do that probably a couple of times a week because I walk past and oval and the oval that I walk past, I try to walk from goal, well, I don't I walk, not try to.
I walk from gold to goal up and back.
So I guess goal to goal up and back is maybe three hundred meters maybe a bit more. Where I walk backwards the whole way, and so there's nothing around me. I can't trip over anything. There's over grass, there's grass I'm walking on. I should say what's over grass? And I guess you know. The beauty of this is that you know, when you think about when we walk, obviously we're always are generally moving in a forward direction most of the time now and then laterally, but generally we
don't step sideway as much. We don't step to the right or to the left much. In terms of the total steps that we take per day, for most of us, very close to one hundred percent of those steps would be taken moving forward, obviously, But what is great for our us, I'm going to be honest, our glut sclop medius and all of those muscles around our bum in
our bum and our hamstrings, even lower back muscles. What's great is backward walking because we're getting a bit of strength through that kind of posterior area or that posterior chain of muscles some people call it, where it is quite often compared to the muscles on the front quads hip flexes, all of that quite weak. So backward walking is great. Also, backward walking is something that is recommended by a lot of physios and a lot of EPs
for alleviating back pain. And I have had a history of back pain, and since I've started it's not to say that you can if you do backward walking you'll never have back paint again. But for me it's been a game changer and so I've probably been doing it consistently for about three years and I've really had no significant back issues. Well, I have had zero significant back issues over that time. Whether or not that's coincidence, whether that's correlation or causation, who the fuck knows, but I'm
going to keep doing it. Number four is what we call a wall squad. Now, this is when you probably know what it is. It's like you put your back against the wall, preferably probably not a probably not a plaster wall, unless you're sure it's in front of a stud Probably you know, something quite sturdy, and then you slide your torso your upper body down the wall until your legs are bent at the knees and they are in a right angle position or a ninety degree position
at the knees. So you're now supporting your body weight against the wall.
So you're leaning so.
Your upper body and the top of your is leaning against the wall. Your head is also against the wall. Notice that your head is also against the wall, shoulders against the wall, back pressed against the wall, top of your bum against the wall, and then your legs are at right angles in front of you, your feet are on the ground, your knees are bent to ninety degrees and you are just holding yourself there. Now, the way that people do this, which makes it easier, which we
don't want is Oh. Also, by the way, I just thought, how much backward walking in three to five minutes whenever you get a chance to do it in terms of.
Volume wall squat.
So what you'll see a lot of people do is their lower leg instead of it going straight down to the ground vertically, they have their feet way forward, which means it's the knee. The back of the knee joint is not at a right angle, not at a ninety degree angle. It's at a more obtuse or a bigger angle, which takes the pressure off the odds.
We don't want that.
We want we want your need to be right angles, your feet flat on the ground, and everything else against the wall. Now, what what does this do? It builds strength, It builds lower body strength. And it's a static contraction. So your muscles are not you know, increasing or decreasing in length through the movement.
They're just static.
So there's no eccentric or concentric contraction. There's just a static hold. Now you might start with fifteen seconds and go fuck with your fuck, that's pretty hard. Cool start at fifty you might start at six seconds, you might start at three minutes.
I mean.
But also if this is for you potentially dangerous, don't know who you are, I don't know what your current level of function is, then maybe don't do it. Having said that, like if I was going to get my dad to do this exercise I'm describing to you now, instead of his legs being at right angles, I would have his bum a bit higher on the wall, if you know what I mean. So he's not in such a deep squad. He's kind of in a partial squat, halfway between being upright and being in that position that
I described. But even for someone who's eighty five being in something of a wall squad, even if it's like a half wall squad, that's a good place to start. Okay, So we've got the balance stuff, the stairs, the hills, the backward walking, the wall squad. Next one, I literally have one of these, and my dad has one. I took him up one two months ago, which is just a rubber ball or a tennis ball you can use to squeeze and you go, well, what's that about. Well,
we know that there's an absolute. There's research in fact correlating stronger grip strength with longevity and not only a lifespan, but also health span. Now we're not saying that just including squeezing a ball into your program is going to make you live ten years longer, but we do know that there is a correlation between that because generally, when someone's stronger in the grip, they're stronger in the forearms,
they're stronger in the body, and so on. So there, whether or not that is causal or you know, causation or correlation, I'm pretty sure it's correlation more than it is causation. In other words, a strong grip doesn't make you live twenty years longer, but definitely you know that. Really easy, Just grab a ball, squeeze it in, hold it as hard as you can for three seconds, let it go. I'm doing it right now in my office. I'm doing this squeezing movement.
It's hilarious.
So squeeze the ball for two or three seconds, let it go. Squeeze it two or three seconds, hold let it go. Do that five times each hand. Now, even if you can only squeeze a little bit, whatever, you can do one hundred percent for you is one hundred percent. Your maximum squeeze might be someone else's easy squeeze or
vice versa. But what we do is when we do that, where increasing grip strength, hand strength in general, forearm strength, and certainly you know it's a very easy thing to do with some pretty good benefits.
Speaking of balls, number six is bouncing the ball. Now.
One of my favorite sayings is we don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing, which I think George Bernard sure said. So I'm definitely not taking credit for that, but you know it seems funny. But the ball that I told you that I squeeze, it's a yellow rubber ball. And I often, probably sixty or seventy percent of the time when I go walking, I take that ball with me and I often just walk five k's say, seven thousand steps just bouncing the ball.
I'll be listening to a podcast or listening to a lecture that I need to for UNI. I'll be walking and I just bounced the ball on the footpath in front of me, or the dirt in front of me, from hand to hand, so across in front of me, right to left, bouncing off the ground in between left to right, bouncing off the ground in between, and again balance, coordinate, coordination, put your teeth in harps. Really easy to do, fun, good for you, good for hand eye coordination, and something
that creates a positive effect. And also like it's fun. I know it seems weird and people look at me sometimes. In fact, a lady said to me recently that looks like fun, and I said, I'm a twelve year old trapped in a sixty one year old body, and she laughed, I said, and she said something like we should all be so twelve, you know, or something like that. I'm like, yeah, it's fun, and you know, it's I don't know.
To me.
I get in a little bit of flow state.
Just walk bounce, walk, bounce, walk bounce.
So you can use the same ball that you do for your ball squeeze. Number seven still includes the ball, although it could be a different a different ball. And this is really coordination and a little bit of mobility and strength and balance, which is throwing and catching.
Most people don't throw.
A ball after they're about eighteen or not regularly, or even fourteen or fifteen. So five hundred meters from where I live and by the way, I'm not trying to be self indulgent here. I'm just giving you examples, like if you want to find a way to do this shit, you'll do it.
You'll do it. And if you think, you know.
One of the challenges with this stuff is it doesn't seem high tech, it doesn't seem like groundbreaking. But if people just did this stuff, but they just don't like if old people just squeeze the ball all the time. If old people, and I mean that with complete respect because I'm one of them, walk some stairs. If old people did some not think about it and not do it three times, then never do it again. If old people just bound the ball or throw a ball right,
and it could be throwing it to another person. It could be an underhand throw. It doesn't have to be an arm over your head, external rotation of the shoulder, you know, world champion throw.
It can be under arm catch, under arm catch.
So right where two blocks from where I live, there's a small park on a corner, and in the middle of that is like a half basketball court on one side and like on the other side are half a tennis court with a brick wall in the middle. And so I just go on the tennis side, and I just throw my ball at the wall. I throw with one hand, I catch with the other. I throw great with my left hand because I'm left handed, and I throw shit with my right hand because I'm left handed.
But I throw whatever hand I throw with, I catch with the other. I do that for about one hundred throws. Then I keep doing my walk. Now again, like these things that seem really simple and childish are so good for your nervousness, so good for your balance, so good for your hand eye coordination, so good for keeping you young.
But you know, we just need to get out and do it.
My suggestion to you, if this is resonating, and if you're forty five or older, maybe an idea for you. Of course, you know you're going to do something or nothing. That's okay, and that's up to you, of course, but you might choose two, three, four of these and go, I'm just going to start to do this. I'm going to start to do some of this just because it's easy to do and there's some real.
Value in it.
So the next one that I'm going to.
Share with you is.
It's it's this is more for older people, but it's called I call it a clock step, and what it is is so this is probably I mean, anyone can do this, but especially for people who are say sixty plus. Now, if you know someone who's sixty plus or seventy plus or eighty plus, you can.
Get them to do this.
And this is a really good exercise. So let's you need to have a little bit of an imagination. So you're standing on the floor. You've got a little bit of space around you. So where you are standing is the middle of a clock, right, So remember this activity is called clock step clock step.
So you're in the middle of the clock.
Then you are you step forward from the middle of the clock, which on this clock that's on the ground. So you're stepping up to twelve let's say, left foot forward and then right foot and then back to the middle of the clock. Left foot back, right foot back. Cool. So you've just gone from twelve o'clock back to the middle of clock. Now you go to nine o'clock on
the ground, which is to your left. So you step out left foot to the nine, bring your right foot to the nine, then step back to the middle of the clock with your right foot, bring your left foot in to meet you you're back in the middle of clock. So now you've gone twelve o'clock, nine o'clock, and now you step to your right, which as we look at the ground, as we step to the right, that would
be our three o'clock on our clock. So we step out to the right with our right foot leading this time, not left, so and we step laterally, so in other words, we step out.
To the side.
We don't, so we keep facing the twelve o'clock. So we're facing straight ahead, but we're stepping to the right. Take right foot out, bring left foot to meet right, then bring left foot back into the center of the clock, right foot back in, and now you know what we're going to do. We're going to step back to the six. We're going to keep facing forward, and now we're going back to the six left foot, back to the six right foot, and then back into the middle of the clock.
Right now, so it's just a four way kind of step where we're going forwards, we're going sideways, left, sideways right, and then we're going backwards. But even just doing twenty of those, twenty of those is probably going to take you two hundred seconds, So like once around the clock is maybe ten seconds. I actually haven't timed it, but I'm guessing summer in that now, two hundred and seconds of that. Let's round it down to one eighty to make it three minutes.
That's quite a bit of work. That's quite a bit of work.
Some people might start with three, some people might start with five.
Just start whereever you start.
And this is really good for like if you've got a mom or a dad, or a grandma or a grandpa or somebody, or it might even be you where you know you've had a hip operation or you've got some kind of balance issues, or I don't do this at the moment because I probably am a little bit to advance for that. But there'll be a time in my life where I really probably you know, in the not too distant future, where I incorporate that and if you really then want to go, I want to do
a more advanced version of that. Will then when you step to the point on the clock, you bend your knee a little bit and you do almost like a lunge, like a lunge where you step into it, you bend your knee, then you bring your other foot forward. Now, whether or not you're going to twelve or nine or three or six o'clock on clock, you can still do
that same kind of knee bending lunch movement. Again, if you're worried about any of this, clear it with your physio or your exercise scientist or your exercise physiologist or you know the appropriate health fitness professional.
Two to go.
The second one is the second last one is easy, easy to explain, and relatively easy to execute depending on how you do it. So the second last one is just weighted walking, and so you can do it a couple of ways. There are actually vests that you can buy, but I'm trying to do this without any equipment for you. But so I have two vests, two weighted vests or two vests that I can put weight in. And the weights that I have are three pounds. Don't ask me why, Well,
ask me why why? Because it's American, so it comes in pounds. But I can put up to what is it? I think it's one hundred. It's about one hundred. Goive will take one hundred and forty pounds, which is about sixty four kilograms, which is crazy in one of my vests. Obviously I've done that like twice. It's hysterically hard.
I don't do that.
But what I often do is, which is for me relatively easy. I put twenty kilos in one of my vests, and so which is it's solid. But I can walk with a twenty kilo pack or a twenty kilo kind of vest, you know, relatively, I mean it's it's I'm working, but I can do five ks with no real problems. Now think about this. I go from my current weight is eighty one kilos, I put on this vest and now I'm now I weigh in inverted commas one hundred
and one kilos. So now the same guy with the same lungs and the same strength, and the same bones and skeleton and bone density is moving twenty more kilos. You think twenty kilos as a percentage of eighty is twenty five percent, right, as a percentage of eighty, twenty extra kilos is twenty five percent. So even though it's only twenty kilos more, it's twenty five percent more of my body weight. So now I've increased my body weight in inverted commas by twenty five percent.
So what does that do for me?
Well, that increases That makes my heart and lungs work faster, so there's cardiovascular benefit, increases bone density because I'm carrying more weight, increases strength, increases muscular injury. It's whole bunch of stuff, right, And it also with me, it makes me really activate my core, you know how the kids say that. It really makes me make sure that all of the muscles around my lower back and stomach, so that whole kind of belt around your waist are really
switched on and activated. So core muscles, lower back, postural muscles. Now you're all going, well, I don't have a fucking vest. I'm like, I get you.
Now.
You could find.
You could not wouldn't be very comfortable, but you could walk.
With a couple of bricks, you could walk. I think most of you are going to have somewhere a.
Backpack or you know.
Like one of the things I do is I walk to the supermarket sometimes where I will buy maybe ten kilos of groceries and I walk down without them obviously walk back with them. So I've done a ten kilo carry back from the and it's a bit uncomfortable, and I've got more weight in one hand than the other and this, but all of that discomfort and that imbalance
means I've got to work harder. I've got to work harder. So, if per chance you have a backpack, if not, maybe you want to buy a real cheap one from somewhere target ten dollars one and put some weight in there. You don't have to put in I would start with five kilos. And again I probably shouldn't say that. It depends on who we are, but most people that I know that would do this. You can probably start with five kilos. If you're a bit fitter and stronger, you
can start with ten. And also the other benefit is because you're moving more weight because you're you know, like for example, this is bro science what I'm about to share with you, but I want to give you an example. Say when I walk, Let's say when I walk five kilometers.
Let's say I.
Walk for an hour, and let's say I'm walking at five kilometers an hour, so that's my average speed. And let's say hypothetically I expend four hundred calories in that five kilometer slash one hour.
Four hundred calories.
Now, how many calories I expend depends on, in other words, how much energy I burn depends on how much I weigh.
One two how.
Efficiently or inefficiently I walk. Interestingly, the more inn ficial or biomechanically inefficient I am, the greater the energy expenditure, whether or not I'm walking on a really firm surface or a soft surface. Like you know that walking on sand is much harder than walking on a hard surface, So thirty minutes of soft sand walking is exponentially harder than thirty minutes of walking around suburbia on a footpath. So and then I guess the last one. There's probably
another one that I can't think of. But the last one that I can think of is whether or not you're walking on an incline or flat or stairs or hills, or that's a variable too. But back to me going, Let's say the variable that I change is I'm now
twenty kilos heavier. Well, I'm going to expend I don't know the exact number, but I would tell you that I'm going to expend a significantly greater number of calories more energy doing the same walk five kilometers at the same speed five kilometers per hour over the same time sixty.
Minutes one hour.
Right, doing the exact same thing but at a heavier body weight in inverted commas. I'm going to increase energy expenditure significantly, and also I'm going to get a much greater cardiovascular benefit because my heart rate is going to be up because I'm working much harder to mobilize one hundred and one kilos not eighty one kilos. So a range of benefits, but don't be me. You could start with two ks, you could start with one K. Like whatever you are carrying is an extra challenge that you
don't normally have, so think about that. And my last one is the easiest thing. My caveat with this is if you suffer from or deal with low blood pressure, you might want to maybe give this a miss, or if you're not sure if what I'm about to share with you is you know, safe for you, or it's definitely not a high risk thing by the way, but still let's be sure check with your medical professional. And that's just box breathing. And we've spoken about box breathing before.
And while this ain't going to make you run fast or a jumphire, or it's not going to.
Make you jacked.
For those of you who overthink, for those of you who deal with stress and anxiety and who struggle with the internal chaos and turmoil. At times, this kind of concentrated, focused breathing can be life changing, life changing, if not state changing, in the moment. And so my protocol, so box breathing is essentially we breathe in for a period of time. Then once we fully breathe in, we hold
our breath for the same amount of time. Then we breathe out for the same amount of time, and at the end of that full exhalation, we hold our breath for the same amount of time.
And then that's one box.
So in, hold out, hold, So we've kind of gone, you know, around the square, so to speak. So for me, I tend to do five to six seconds. I don't sit there with a watch or a clock, but you know, so for me it would be in I don't know why, I'm demonstrating breathing, in, breathing and breathing, and then I get to the end of that, I hold that for five or six then I breathe out slowly five or six and at the end of that exhalation, when you
really want to take a breath, you just hold. And what that does is it activates our power sympathetic nervous system. So the calm the farm, not the fight or flight the other one. And typically typical symptoms lower heart rate, more relaxed breathing, lower blood pressure, changes in biochemistry where we now our body starts to produce calm chemicals, not you know, the kind of stress chemicals, and it puts us quite quickly, or it can put us quite quickly
in a much better space. So I recommend box breathing, you know, once or twice a day, or.
As often as you need it.
But again, all of those things, so number one is balanced, Number two is stare or he'll walking.
Number three is backward walking.
Number four as wall squats, Number four as ball squeeze, So just grip strength stuff, bouncing the ball as number six throwing catching. Number seven the clock step, remember standing in the middle of the clock blah blah blah, weighted walking, So exact same protocol. Just make yourself a bit heavier. And the last one box breathing. Now I'm not going to win an award for that program. It's not groundbreaking,
it's not revolutionary. But the truth is that most people don't do any of that stuff ever, most people, well.
Not intentionally anyway.
So if you're a person and you want to start to make.
I'm pretty sure you're a person. Let me say that again.
If you are a person who wants to make a few changes, there might be something really simple in there which is.
A kind of a stepping off point for you.
All right, team, Or or you might want to share this with someone for whom you think it's relevant and might be helpful. Love, your collective guts is see ya.